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6 Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Hommage à R. Sch. Like Franz Schubert’s Winterreise cycle, György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, op. 24 (1985–86),centers on the archetypal theme of wandering,the seeking of a path that remains profoundly elusive.Certain of the trenchant texts extracted by Kurtág from Kafka’s diaries and letters call into question or even deny the very existence of such a path,or Weg.1 Yet for Kurtág as for Schubert,the need to keep searching for the elusive goal is inescapable,an existential necessity.So central is this theme that it dominates the entire second part of the four-part structure of the Kafka Fragments as well as numerous other songs. In its overall length, taking approximately an hour in performance time, the Kafka Fragments is comparable to Schubert’s masterpiece, despite the intense compression of Kurtág’s style, which is often reminiscent of Webern.2 Like many earlier song composers, Kurtág employs a single instrument to accompany the soprano on her journey, replacing the piano in this role by the violin. One trigger for his choice of the violin was the last song in part III, the “Szene in der Elektrischen ” (Scene in the electric streetcar), whose text is among the first entries in Kafka’s diary. In Kurtág’s setting of the text of this suggestive, almost operatic dream-vision, the dancer Eduardowa is accompanied by two different violinists, who are distinguished in performance by a change in instrument and tuning,with the single violinist changing position on the stage to signal the switch in role.The musical setting of the opening sentence has a floating,improvisatory quality,punctuated by a single bar line—the one placed after the words “a lover of music” and preceding “travels everywhere.” In what follows, two contrasting styles of music 164 chapter 6 are offered by the violinist: a waltz of somewhat popular,sentimental character (as is especially noticeable at “E-lek-tri-schen”) and then a lively,fiery idiom strongly suggestive of a Romanian dance.The Romanian dance is appropriately brash,fittingly unfitting (unpassend).These two styles are associated in turn with Eusebius and Florestan, respectively, the contrasting personality types used by Schumann, a composer whose legacy is especially important to Kurtág. The challenge of Kurtág’s style has much to do with his openness to the artistic legacy of the past.3 He does not profess to negate the past in achieving an artwork in the present; in Bartók’s terms,this music represents an evolution,not a revolution. Yet Kurtág is keenly sensitive to the pitfalls of composition in an age often beset by trends and oversimplification under the banner of slogans such as “modernism ”and “postmodernism.”A distinguished performer and teacher,he is urgently concerned that his works be adequately conveyed in concerts and recordings. In approaching the Kafka Fragments,we do well to recognize the indispensable tensional balance between sharply contrasting yet complementary aesthetic attitudes such as freedom and determination, imaginative fantasy and structural necessity. The oasis of the self; despair over human fallibility and vulnerability; skepticism about goals; the discernment of meaning in the apparently trivial; the wasting away of time; the unexpected presence of the uncanny: all of these soul-states surface in different ways in the pithy aphorisms from Kafka as set by Kurtág. In the architecture of the whole cycle, the prominent ideas of the path and its negation, on the one hand, and of a pair of wandering protagonists, on the other, are emphasized.An outline of the forty pieces is provided in Fig.6.1.The processional ostinato of I/1, “Die Guten gehn im gleichen Schritt” (The good march in even steps), with its straightforward, rigid alternation of C and D in the violin representing the overconfident steps of the “Good,”provides a point of reference for the playful,capricious movements of the “others”performing “dances of time,” as conveyed in the vocal part.4 The steady steps of “Die Guten gehn”also serve as springboard for the covering up of the “path” with autumn leaves in I/2, whereas the extended setting of “Der wahre Weg”(The true path),which forms the entirety of part II,submits the overextended notion of the “true path”to decisive critique. As we have seen,the last piece in part III,“Szene in der Elektrischen,”employs the pair of violinists associated with Eusebius and...

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